Maciej Kuciara, a 21-year-old artist from Poland, is currently a concept artist and texture artist at People Can Fly, and he is also a freelance writer.
Let’s take a look at the finished effect first:
idea
After I was done working, I had some free time, and in just a few minutes, I came up with a few concepts. This idea is too vague to represent the image well. I thought I needed something special, and luckily Yosemite Falls came to the rescue. I found some beautiful photos and thought I could show them in a different way. So, that's how the idea started. I collected some Yosemite Falls images of rocks and clouds for reference, all designed to help express mood, color, and shape.
composition and color
Since mountain waterfalls have a special shape and charm, I decided not to change the original composition of those reference images. I really like the original photo images and the attractive mountains, but something is still lost. The shot seems a bit empty and has little depth. I considered the emptiness of the shot and the clouds and air surrounding the mountains behind them. That's why I put these things in, splitting the hill into two smaller hills and putting them into the image. The weather in the reference looks very cool. The only sunlight disappears in front of the storm, so they need to be drawn inside as well.
I want to challenge myself. I decided not to use any photographic images in my images, but in lieu of actual paintings. Photoshop and a Wacom graphics tablet are just the tools I need. I started applying color, trying to bring out the basic shapes and express the mood with flecks of mid-tones, a bit of light and shadows in different places.
Detailed description
After this first step, I started working on other details. I mainly use Photoshop brushes and filters to do the necessary work on multiple layers. There is always a lot to make during the painting process. Every necessary drawing on a layer must be done without making mistakes. This program gives you many opportunities to use masks and enables you to use many other effects.
Details of the waterfall, from sketch to final composition:
Brushes used to create clouds:
Because no photos were used on the images, I had to notice more details. System brushes are very useful when you want to paint some quick special effects. I created some brushes for painting trees, bushes and rocks as well as some other elements. To paint the texture of the rocks, I copied some of the ones I had already painted and made them with light effects and a noise filter. I saved the mask layer's system parameters for opacity and saturation, then made some cracks on a new brown layer. Finally I used the system's dirt layer over the original layer. When I'm 100% sure everything looks good, then I merge all the layers. Especially when you're working at 4K, the many layers in the image take up a lot of RAM.
The clouds were created using a basic airbrush (sky brush) on added layers. I created an effect similar to piled flowers and grass on the surrounding slope. Use the same method to create waterfalls and mist. The fog layer consists of three layers.
The tree is drawn with many tiny green point brushes. I chose the direction of the light source very carefully so that the shadows looked more realistic. Choosing the direction of the light early can easily solve the problem of sculpting trees and other geometric objects, as it may affect the composition of the ground, sky, and overall color layers.
Post-production
To make the layers more realistic, I applied three additional layers that added shadow and light effects. As the sun shines from the back left, I added a lot of yellow glow to fit the image. This gives the image a warm and moist feel. I also added some dark gradient lines from bottom to top, to draw out more drama and emphasize the ensuing storm. At the end of post-compositing, I decided to adjust the brightness, contrast and saturation of the painting. Furthermore, the mask option is very handy here. First, the Hue and Saturation masks were used with a blue shift, but here the opacity value was very low. I then adjusted the brightness and contrast of the image, and finally adjusted the saturation to be more bluish without creating effects on the hue and saturation layers.